Apify pricing starts with a free plan that includes $5 of platform usage a month, and the paid plans cost $19, $199 or $999 a month (10% less billed yearly). Each plan includes the same amount of prepaid usage as its price, and everything you run draws from it: compute units, proxy traffic, storage and the per-result fees of Store Actors.
So the plan price is the floor, not the bill. This guide shows what each line costs, works through three real scenarios, and compares the result with Scrape.ly.
Prices checked on 22 October 2026 on apify.com/pricing and Apify's docs.
Apify pricing plans in 2026
| Plan | Monthly | Billed yearly | Included usage | Max RAM | Concurrent runs | Store discount | Support |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | $5 | 16 GB | 5 | None | Community |
| Starter | $19 | $17/mo | $19 | 64 GB | 32 | Bronze | Chat |
| Scale | $199 | $179/mo | $199 | 256 GB | 128 | Silver | Priority chat |
| Business | $999 | $899/mo | $999 | 512 GB | 256 | Gold | Account manager |
| Enterprise | Custom (contact sales) | Dedicated team |
There is also a Creator plan at $1 a month for developers who build and publish Actors, with a one-time $500 of platform usage for the first six months.
How Apify billing works
Your plan's included usage is a monthly budget. Every service you use is priced in dollars and subtracted from it. Four things fill that budget:
Compute units (CU). One CU is 1 GB of RAM running for one hour. A run's CU is its memory in GB times its duration in hours, measured to the second, so a 1 GB run for six minutes uses 0.1 CU. The CU price depends on the plan: $0.20 on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale, $0.13 on Business. Apify's usage docs also note that memory sets the CPU share: 4 GB gets one full core.
Proxy. Residential traffic costs $8 per GB on Free and Starter, $7.50 on Scale and $7 on Business. Datacenter proxies are priced per IP, not per GB: 5, 30, 200 or 500 IPs are included, and extra IPs cost $1, $0.80 or $0.60 each. Google SERP proxy costs $2.50 to $1.70 per 1,000 SERPs, and the Unblocker $1.50 to $1 per 1,000 requests.
Storage and data transfer. Dataset, key-value store and request queue operations and data transfer are billed as platform usage too. Reading a run's dataset after it finishes also counts.
Store Actor fees. Most Store Actors use pay per event: a fixed price per result or action, set by the developer. Apify says most pay-per-event Actors include platform usage in the event price, but some charge it separately. Pay-per-usage Actors charge nothing extra and you pay their compute, proxy and storage.
Two rules decide what happens at the edges of the budget:
- Unused usage expires at the end of the billing cycle. It does not roll over.
- Overage is invoiced. On a paid plan, usage above the included amount is added to your next invoice, up to the usage limit you set in billing. On Free, access is blocked until the next cycle.
Is Apify free? What the free plan includes
Yes, Apify has a free plan with no credit card. It gives you $5 of platform usage every month at the $0.20 CU rate, up to 16 GB of RAM, 5 concurrent runs and 5 datacenter IPs. Residential proxy costs $8 per GB and, on the free plan, works only inside the Apify platform, not from your own scripts.
Three things limit how far $5 goes:
- Store prices are at the Free tier. Tiered Store Actors charge the free tier the highest price. The Apify Store's Google Maps Scraper by Compass charges $4.00 per 1,000 places on Free, against $3.00 on Bronze.
- Credits expire monthly. What you don't use by the end of the cycle is gone.
- There is no overage. When the $5 is used up, runs are blocked until the next cycle.
For testing and small monthly jobs the free plan works well. For anything scheduled, plan for Starter or above.
Worked examples: what Apify costs
These use only Apify's published rates. Your real numbers depend on the Actor, the site and retries, so run a small test first.
Example 1: your own Actor, every hour
Apify's docs give this example: an Actor with 4 GB of memory that runs for 15 minutes uses 4 × 0.25 = 1 CU. Run it every hour for a month and you use 1 × 24 × 30 = 720 CU.
| Plan | CU price | Compute cost | Included usage | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $0.20 | 720 × $0.20 = $144.00 | $19 | $125.00 on your next invoice |
| Scale | $0.16 | 720 × $0.16 = $115.20 | $199 | Covered |
| Business | $0.13 | 720 × $0.13 = $93.60 | $999 | Covered |
Proxy and storage come on top. That leads to the second example.
Example 2: a proxy-heavy scraper, 20 GB of residential traffic a month
Residential proxies are what sites with bot protection usually require, and they are billed per GB.
| Plan | Residential price | 20 GB costs |
|---|---|---|
| Free / Starter | $8.00/GB | 20 × $8.00 = $160.00 |
| Scale | $7.50/GB | 20 × $7.50 = $150.00 |
| Business | $7.00/GB | 20 × $7.00 = $140.00 |
On Starter, 20 GB alone is more than eight times the plan's $19 of included usage. On Scale, it uses three quarters of the $199.
Example 3: 1,000 Google Maps places from a Store Actor
The Apify Store's Google Maps Scraper (compass/crawler-google-places) has tiered pay-per-event prices, read from its public pricing API on 22 October 2026:
| Plan tier | Per place | 1,000 places | With 1 filter (category, rating, website…) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0.004 | 1,000 × $0.004 = $4.00 | $4.00 + 1,000 × $0.001 = $5.00 |
| Bronze (Starter) | $0.003 | 1,000 × $0.003 = $3.00 | $3.00 + 1,000 × $0.001 = $4.00 |
Each run also has an Actor start event of $0.00005. On the Free plan, 1,000 filtered places cost exactly your whole monthly $5.
Extra costs to plan for
- Overage invoices. Paid-plan usage above the included amount lands on your next invoice. Set a usage limit in billing if you want a ceiling.
- Extra datacenter IPs. Beyond the included IPs, each costs $1 (Starter), $0.80 (Scale) or $0.60 (Business).
- SERP proxy and Unblocker. $2.50 to $1.70 per 1,000 SERPs and $1.50 to $1 per 1,000 Unblocker requests, depending on plan.
- Add-ons. Extra concurrent runs cost $5 per run and extra Actor RAM $1 per GB.
- Actor add-on events. Store Actors can charge per filter, per enrichment or per detail page on top of the base result price. The Google Maps Scraper above has Free-tier add-ons from $0.0005 (per review or image) to $0.10 (per enriched lead).
- Retries and heavy pages. Apify's docs list browser use, run size and page weight as the main drivers of compute; large pages can take up to three times the resources of average ones.
How to estimate your own Apify cost
Apify itself recommends a test run as the easiest way to find an Actor's usage. Do it in four steps:
- Run the Actor on a small input, 10 to 20 results.
- Open the run and read its usage: compute units, proxy GB, storage and event charges.
- Divide by the number of results to get a cost per result, then multiply by your monthly volume.
- Compare the total with your plan's included usage. Anything above it is overage on the next invoice, so pick the plan where the total fits, or set a usage limit.
Repeat the test for each site, because page weight, browser use and retries change the numbers a lot. Do the same test on Scrape.ly with a maximum charge per run (for example maxTotalChargeUsd: 0.10) and the test itself can never cost more than you decided. The run options docs explain the cap.
Apify vs Scrape.ly pricing
Scrape.ly is an Apify-compatible platform: most Apify Actors run on it unchanged, and apify-client code works after you change the import, the base URL and the token. So you can compare the same workload on both. Here is where Scrape.ly costs less.
| Apify | Scrape.ly | |
|---|---|---|
| Residential proxy | $8/GB (Free, Starter), $7.50 (Scale), $7 (Business) | $4/GB (Free), $3.50 (Starter), $2.75 (Scale), $2 (Business) |
| Datacenter proxy | Per IP: 5 to 500 included, then $1 to $0.60 per IP | Per GB: $1 (Free, Starter), $0.90 (Scale), $0.75 (Business) |
| Google Maps places, Free plan | $4.00 per 1,000, plus $1.00 per 1,000 per filter | $3.60 per 1,000, no filter fees |
| Spending control | Usage limit in billing; overage invoiced | Prepaid balance plus a maximum charge per run that stops the run |
| Free plan | $5 of usage a month, no card | $5 of usage a month, no card |
| Runs your Apify Actors | Native | Yes, most run unchanged |
Rerun the proxy example on Scrape.ly's rates and the gap is plain:
| Plan | Apify, 20 GB residential | Scrape.ly, 20 GB residential |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | 20 × $8.00 = $160.00 | 20 × $3.50 = $70.00 |
| Scale | 20 × $7.50 = $150.00 | 20 × $2.75 = $55.00 |
| Business | 20 × $7.00 = $140.00 | 20 × $2.00 = $40.00 |
That's $90 to $100 saved every month on proxy traffic alone, at the same plan size.
The spending model differs too. Scrape.ly draws every run from a prepaid US-dollar balance and lets you set maxTotalChargeUsd on any run. That cap covers everything the run can cost (compute, storage, data transfer, proxy, browser and the Actor's fee), and the run stops when it reaches it. Nothing is invoiced after the fact.
Store Actors show one pay-per-event price on their page, and the 568 Actors in the Scrape.ly Store cover Google Maps, Amazon, LinkedIn Jobs, TikTok, Zillow and hundreds of other sites. The Google Maps Scraper charges $3.60 per 1,000 places, and the Website Content Crawler $0.50 per 1,000 pages. Our 10-place run on 22 October 2026 was charged $0.0369 in total, platform usage included (run, log and output).
Scrape.ly's paid plans work like Apify's in one respect: Starter ($19), Scale ($199) and Business ($999) include their price as usage credit. They raise concurrency to 32, 128 and 256 runs and memory to 64, 256 and 512 GB, and lower the per-GB proxy rates shown above. See the Scrape.ly pricing page for every rate, and the Scrape.ly vs Apify comparison for features beyond price.
If you are weighing a move, Apify alternatives walks through the switch step by step, with the code.
FAQ
How much does Apify cost per month?
Apify's plans cost $0 (Free), $19 (Starter), $199 (Scale) and $999 (Business) a month, or $17, $179 and $899 a month billed yearly. Each includes the same dollar amount of usage. Usage above that is added to your next invoice on paid plans.
Is the Apify free plan really free?
Yes. It has no time limit and needs no credit card. You get $5 of usage every month, 16 GB of RAM and 5 concurrent runs. When the $5 runs out, runs are blocked until the next cycle, and unused credit does not carry over.
What is a compute unit on Apify?
A compute unit is 1 GB of memory running for one hour. A 4 GB run that lasts 15 minutes uses 1 CU. It costs $0.20 on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale and $0.13 on Business.
Do unused Apify credits roll over?
No. Apify's pricing page says unused prepaid usage expires at the end of the billing cycle.
Why is my Apify bill higher than my plan price?
Because the plan price is prepaid usage, not a cap. Proxy traffic, compute, storage and Store Actor fees above the included amount are billed as overage on the next invoice. Residential proxy traffic at $7 to $8 per GB is often the biggest line.
Is there a cheaper alternative to Apify?
For proxy-heavy work, yes. Scrape.ly charges $2 to $4 per GB of residential traffic against Apify's $7 to $8, runs most Apify Actors unchanged, and its Google Maps Scraper costs $3.60 per 1,000 places with no filter fees.
